For the past seven years, I’ve been in an “interpenile relationship”—I, the lesser of the two you might say, am circumcised; my partner is not. This contrast between our members is not exactly at the top of our list of concerns. But it is nonetheless interesting how my prepuce came to disappear into a medical waste bin in a bustling New Jersey hospital on some springtime day in 1975, whereas his, by contrast, has remained a fellow traveler all the long way from that tiny Mexican village where he slipped from his young mother’s womb on a chilly December morning in 1981. That womb, incidentally, belonged to a Roman Catholic. The one that I bathed in, the place in which I had my “bones and sinews knitted together,” in the words of Job, was the property of a Jew. So despite neither of us being particularly patriotic nor, certainly, religious today, the organs dangling so differently between us are nevertheless the very incarnations of our parents’ vast cultural differences.

Whatever the reasons that previous generations may have had for choosing to remove their infant sons’ foreskins, they were almost always unconvincing. All else being equal—and let me reiterate that caveat because it’s likely to go unnoticed, with some readers eagerly pointing out to me those rare cases of congenital defects in which circumcision can legitimately improve the quality of life for some males, which is of course true—all else being equal, any dubious benefits derived from religious, social, hygienic, or aesthetic reasons are clearly outweighed by the costs of male circumcision. Because of some rabbi in Hackensack shaking his head over my intact genitalia, my parents went unblinkingly along with the amputation of a fully operational, perfectly healthy, and probably adaptive body part, all to sacrifice an ounce of their son’s tender flesh to a god that he would never believe in anyway.

Today, however, all is no longer equal, and the balance between the relative risks and benefits of male circumcision has clearly shifted in the other direction. That is, it has according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which just earlier this week put out its revised position statement on infant male circumcision. Here’s the money quote:

Systematic evaluation of English-language peer-reviewed literature from 1995 through 2010 indicates that preventive health benefits of elective circumcision of male newborns outweigh the risks of the procedure. Benefits include significant reductions in the risk of urinary tract infection in the first year of life and, subsequently, in the risk of heterosexual acquisition of HIV and the transmission of other sexually transmitted infections.

Many of our parents, it seems, may have actually made the right decision for the wrong reasons. Although the task force behind the Academy’s reassessment stopped short of advising “routine” and “universal” removal of the foreskin for all newborn males, and stressed that it remains a personal decision to be made by informed parents, its language represents an increasingly unambiguous endorsement of male circumcision among the world’s leading health organizations (including the World Health Organization and UNAIDS) . By contrast, many of the world’s leading parents remain skeptical of the findings reviewed by the Academy, questioning both the methodologies and the generalizability of studies conducted overwhelmingly with African populations, in which rates of infection are dramatically higher than those in the US. (For more information on this research, as well as a description of the physical factors responsible for the reduction of HIV acquisition in circumcised males, see my earlier discussion at Scientific American.) The more vocal “intactivists,” who’ve long been protesting what they regard as an antiquated, cruel and unnecessary ritual act against little boys that is just as abhorrent as female clitoridectomy, have also responded bitterly to this newest AAP development, seeing fresh strands in an ongoing web of conspiracy between the major health organizations, third-party insurance companies implementing the policy views of these organizations, and greedy practitioners who mislead parents about the benefits of circumcision only to reap insurance payouts for “mutilating” children’s genitals.